Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “Phoebe’s life was on fire for the last six years, and you didn’t do squat.”

  “Miracles were never my business. I was born to reveal—”

  “The plain truth, Julie Katz”—Georgina slid the karate belt from her waist—“is that nobody knows why the hell you were born, least of all you.” She wrapped the belt around her arm like a phylactery strap. “When you cracked out of that ecto-thing, I thought a golden age was dawning. I thought you’d have some great wisdom for us. Now I see what a pig you are. Phoebe’s got the right idea—split. Without your father around, this place is death.”

  Julie’s scar pulsated indignantly. “I’m death? That’s what you think? Death? If I had you for a mother, Georgina, I’d probably be a lush now too.”

  Regret spasmed in Julie. Too late: the words were spoken, unretractable as a baby spilled from a glass womb.

  Saying nothing, Georgina marched stiffly out of the temple. Five seconds later the front door slammed explosively, as if Queen Zenobia and the Green Enchantress had just blown up another sand castle.

  In the beacon room of Angel’s Eye, Andrew Wyvern pulls the soaking wick from the lamp and jams it into his mouth. Slowly he swallows, enjoying the tang of the kerosene on his tongue, the feel of the wet threads slithering down his esophagus.

  It hasn’t taken much to gain the attention of the city’s cardiacs, kidney patients, cancer casualties, welfare cases, lunatics, sociopaths, and bums. “Sheila of the Moon has revealed herself!” Wyvern had declared upon entering each hospital and flophouse, and instantly they were his, fixed in his hairy palm. “Follow me!” And they did, right to the beach, where he deftly merged them with Milk’s victims, thus fashioning his final trap: a congregation of despair, hungry for hope.

  The rest went quickly—telling the multitudes he knew where Atlantic City’s savior lived, herding them across the bridge, deploying them around the lighthouse. His plan was at its peak. After years of careful calculation, he had finally made his enemy go public, finally made her sow the seeds of a church.

  The devil laughs as the wick crawls into his bowels. Church, such a lovely sound, church, like the gasp of an Arab child impaled on a Frankish sword at the siege of Jerusalem. Before long Revelationism and its ilk will fade, but not to worry, for Julie Katz’s church—ah, that word again, more delicious than kerosene—her church has taken root.

  The next twenty-four hours will be crucial. If things go awry, the fragile bud will fade: his enemy will slip back into obscurity or, worse, continue mucking around with reality—help for the crusade casualties, a cure for Alzheimer’s, an end to African droughts, a safe and potent insecticide, God knew what.

  Instead she must exit the earth. Abruptly. Unequivocally. Memorably.

  Like Jesus.

  A spirited afternoon breeze blew through the bedroom window, cooling Julie’s sopping and exhausted flesh. Sleep took her to the Galapagos Islands. Hand in hand, she and Howard Lieberman toured the evolutionary showcase—its monster tortoises, dragonlike lizards, psychedelic birds. Howard became Bix. A shovel appeared. Her lover dug into the beach, as if looking for buried treasure. A brilliant light geysered up. Sheila, he shouted, this is wonderful. Sheila, come see. Sheila!

  “Sheila!”

  Bix?

  “Sheila! Sheila! Sheila!”

  Many voices, a mob. Not in the dream—outside it. New Jersey, Brigantine Point, here.

  “Sheila!”

  She slipped into Melanie’s peach kimono and climbed the hundred and twenty-six steps to the beacon room, her nom de plume falling upon her like a succession of blows. Moving past the dormant lamp, she noticed the wick was missing: a Wyvern lamp, she decided, beaming darkness into the world.

  She stepped onto the walkway.

  “Sheila! Sheila!”

  Vibrating like conglomerated bees, the crowd surrounded the lighthouse and overran the jetty. It was as if her temple had suddenly returned to haunt her, a museum of pain converging from all directions. Wheelchairs, crutches, and dialysis machines punctuated the swarming flesh. Stretchers lay on the grass like grave mounds, their occupants strung to IV bottles hanging from aluminum poles. Disease prospered. Blindness thrived. Burned and mutilated corpses proliferated—Milk’s victims, she surmised—yet, curiously, not one of them touched the lawn, each lying instead across the arms of a parent or lover, as if resurrection were contingent upon the body literally being handed over to the divine Sheila.

  “Save us!”

  “We’re yours!”

  “Sheila!”

  Julie cringed. Here, she realized, were the villains of her life, the ones who perpetuated the empire of nostalgia. Their needs were a thousand scalpels slicing her flesh, chopping her into relics—you take the holy spleen, I want the sacred brain. Damn them. She extended her arms, scissoring them as if marionettes dangled from her fingers. The clamor tapered off. “You must live in your own time!”

  “I tried that!” screamed a gaunt young man, his writhing body bound to a wheelchair by leather straps.

  The crowd seemed infinite. She imagined it stretching northward along the coast—the entire Eastern Seaboard lined up, waiting for deliverance. Nobody could be expected to deal with all this, nobody. “You must look to the future!”

  “Screw the future!” called a potbellied man carrying a pre-adolescent girl, her body wracked by cystic fibrosis.

  “Sheila!”

  “Please!”

  “Help!”

  A siege. That was the only word. Julie thought of the rainy Saturday afternoon they’d watched Roger Worth’s videocassette of Night of the Living Dead. Bar the door, board the windows, the zombies are coming. The living dead? No, these were the dead living, she decided. They’d never known the tomb, and yet they were inert, sapped, stunned by the innumerable failings of flesh.

  Bar the door board the windows—forget it, that wouldn’t do, the crisis demanded extreme measures.

  Fixing on the lawn, Julie removed the grass with her stare, shearing it away like a nurse depilating a neurosurgery patient. The dead living drew back, awed, expectant. Seized by Julie’s mind, the spit rumbled and shook. Earth upheaved, sand billowed, rocks shot from the ground like reverse-motion meteorites. The dead living scattered. Every deity is an island, Julie concluded as Angel’s Eye split off from the mainland. Like mother, like daughter: detached, distant, incommunicado.

  The Atlantic gushed into the gap. With three emphatic hand claps she transmuted the surrounding sea into acid as easily as she’d turned the Revelationists’ gasoline into milk. No ordinary acid, not hydrochloric, not sulfuric—the stomach juices of the primordial goat, smoking and swirling, potent enough to gnaw the bottom off any invading vessel, the very stuff a deity might use to etch a tidal basin into a planet or carve a mountain range from a continental plate. Water to acid. Child’s play, elementary alchemy.

  Julie backed into the beacon room.

  Her loneliness had fiber and weight. She could have determined its boiling point, measured its specific gravity. Aunt Georgina hated her; Phoebe had split; Bix was a traitor; Melanie was in Hollywood getting rich; Pop lay divided between a bunch of icy test tubes and a jar on the ocean floor. Alone.

  A deep, low hiss issued from the wickless lamp. A voice rattled in its brass belly. “Let me make you an offer.”

  “What?”

  “An offer.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “An old acquaintance.” The lamp’s inhabitant, a lewd red snake with poison sacs for cheeks, crawled out of the wick slot. The creature smelled of honeyed oranges. “The mob owns you, child. Your secret’s out. You can’t put yourself back in the bottle.”

  “I’ve lost a great deal,” Julie confessed to the snake. “My ministry, my friends…”

  “In twenty-four hours, Pain departs.” Andrew Wyvern slithered down the lamp and sinuated across the floor. “Join the voyage, child. Better to be a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.”

  Julie frowned, c
rinkling her scar. Join the voyage? Leave the comprehended cosmos? She pondered the possibility. “Hell is a long way off, Mr. Wyvern.”

  “Believe me, a person with your background would receive the best treatment there, first-class accommodations. Hell has some of the finest cooks and wine-makers who ever lived. Our masseurs know the lost chords of flesh.”

  Freedom…but no, no, for whatever reasons, her mother had planted her in Atlantic City. “I can’t.”

  “Naturally you’d get in right away. No waiting list for you.”

  “You have a waiting list?”

  “Of course we have a waiting list. Don’t believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.”

  “You inflict eternal punishment on people,” Julie countered.

  “Merely because it’s our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.” The serpent hissed like a dynamite fuse. “Twenty-four hours, Julie. The trains don’t run after that. Come with us. There’s nothing more you can do here.”

  It was crazy to give credence to the devil. “You mean—I’ve fulfilled my purpose?”

  “You published the covenant. Put out the fire. Curtain.”

  “Be honest, Mr. Wyvern. I needn’t break with the known universe to have a life. I could go to…I don’t know. California.”

  “In California they’d track you down instantly. For eleven months your picture was in every issue of the Moon.”

  “I could change my face.”

  “But not your genes. As long as you’re on the earth, your divinity will keep leaking out. Sooner or later, all masks fall off, and then—”

  A fiery drama spouted from the wickless lamp. In the center lay a small, doll-like simulacrum of Julie, nailed to a wooden cross. The doll screamed like a boiling teakettle. Shadowy homunculi stood at its feet, cheering. Cheap trick, Julie thought. Silly, unconvincing…“Shut it off!” Pinprick spots of blood fell from the doll’s wounds. “Off!”

  The lurid puppet show vanished.

  Her arteries vibrated like plucked harp strings. For the first time ever, she felt herself heir to Pop’s heart, that vulnerable pump, so easily damaged. God had demanded propitiation deaths before, and would probably do so again.

  Unless she escaped…

  “Do it, Julie. Save yourself.” The serpent smiled, showing fangs like fish hooks. “I promise you safe passage. One simple condition.”

  “Your conditions are never simple.”

  “You must give the crowd something to remember you by. Make a grand exit—you owe them that.”

  “I could try the Galapagos Islands.”

  “Galapagos, Madagascar, Bali, Tahiti, Sri Lanka—wherever you go, you’ll spend your life looking over your shoulder. There’s pizza in hell, Julie. Movies, physics monographs, ice cream—everything you care about.” The snake slithered back into the lamp. “Remember, child, a grand exit.”

  I should’ve done this years ago, Phoebe thought as the Greyhound coach plunged from the West Side’s blinding daylight into the cool, grimy shadows of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Atlantic City was nothing, an R-rated Disneyland full of losers and whores. At last she’d reached the real thing—Manhattan Island, Gotham, Big Apple, El Dorado with subways. No more waiting forever for a good movie to reach town. No more dealing with tourists and weirdos at the Smile Shop.

  She’d miss Mom, of course, and she was sorry she wouldn’t be there when Melanie got back from Hollywood. But her so-called friend Katz had left her no choice. Phoebe wasn’t about to let anybody mess with her metabolism, no way. A drinking hobby wasn’t the same as alcoholism—in New York, at least, that truth would be understood.

  The bus pulled into its stall, groaning and belching like a colicky rhinoceros. Okay, so Manhattan wasn’t the South Seas island she and Katz had seen in the Deauville. Still, she belonged here. Shouldering her Smile Shop tote bag (WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GO SHOPPING). she staggered down the aisle and stepped off the coach. New York, population nine million, and twenty more had just blown in from South Jersey. She sidled toward the luggage bay, where the passengers waited like mourners around a grave. As usual, she felt detached from such people, outside. Knowing Katz did that to you. A God existed: Phoebe had proof. The devil was loose in Atlantic City: Phoebe had ridden a merry-go-round with him. But what was the final sum? Did Julie Katz matter more than anything, or barely matter at all?

  The bus driver appeared, popped the hatch, and began dragging out the luggage. The most important item in Phoebe’s suitcase wasn’t her liquor cabinet or dynamite but her camcorder. Cinéma-vérité sex—how could she lose? Staged fornication was such a bore. What people wanted, the focus of their primal curiosity, was the genuine article—an actual policewoman boffing her husband, an authentic delivery boy doing it with his girlfriend; every step of the process, each probe and clutch and caress.

  As the passengers paired themselves with their suitcases, a trim, fiftyish black man came toward Phoebe, a fedora snugged down past his eyebrows, gold rings stacked on his fingers. “New in town?” he asked, grinning spectacularly. “I’m Cecil.” He tipped his fedora and thrust his hands into his lavender three-piece suit. “Got a place to stay?”

  Phoebe retrieved her suitcase. “You look like somebody I knew once. You a marine biologist by any chance?”

  “A what?”

  “Marine biologist.”

  “Not exactly, though there’s definitely a biological side to what I do.”

  “You never donated to the Preservation Institute?”

  “What’s that, a religion?”

  “Forget it.”

  The stranger picked up her suitcase. “You’ve got gorgeous eyes, sister. I could start you at three hundred a week. Escort profession. Come home with me, babes.”

  Frost formed in Phoebe’s heart. Escort profession—hah. “I have a career, thank you.” She yanked the suitcase away from the pimp. “I’m in the entertainment business.”

  “Me too.” The pimp winked lasciviously.

  “Video’s my trade. Buzz off.”

  “I just wanted to—”

  “I said buzz off.”

  She entered the Port Authority, rode the escalator up one flight, and waded into the dense screeching streets where she planned to make her fortune.

  But first she needed a drink.

  Between the din of the media and the crowd’s unceasing voice—a polyphonic howl such as wolves might make disgorging broken glass—Julie could not sleep. Throughout the night, newspaper people and TV crews kept arriving, and by dawn they were camped out all over the lawn, occupying it like a hostile army. Atlantic City Press reporters bellowed across the acid moat using bullhorns, demanding to interview the woman who’d saved their town. Video cameras leered at Angel’s Eye from out of cherry pickers. A helicopter labeled WACX-Radio buzzed the tower, its rotor so unnerving that Julie had no choice but to cloak her home in a dense mantle of mist.

  She sought to distract herself with television, but there were so many Sheila stories it was like looking in a mirror. On Channel 9 a statuesque woman swathed in blond hair stood on the edge of the freshly carved moat, surrounded by the dead living, a tower of fog in the background. “Who’s inside the cloud?” she asked the camera. “A magician, some say. The Virgin Mary, others claim.” A microphone hovered near the reporter’s lips like an all-day sucker. “But no rumor is more persistent than the one that brought these people to Brigantine Point. For them, Atlantic City’s mysterious benefactor is none other than Sheila, daughter of God.” The reporter winked. “Tracy Swenson, Channel 11 Action News, Brigantine.”

  At dusk Julie removed the fog, peeling it away like a label from one of Phoebe’s rum bottles. Pain cruised the horizon like a shark patrolling its feeding ground.

  Dress right, Julie told herself. Melanie’s kimono would not befit the memorable exit on which her safe passage was predicated. She put on Mel
anie’s suede boots, crammed herself into Georgina’s prom dress. Nor could she leave her face untouched—a few minutes with Georgina’s makeup, and her eyes widened, her scar vanished, her lips became rose petals.

  She stepped onto the walkway. A thousand eager stares drilled into her heart. Cheers pounded her flesh. Climbing atop the railing, she balanced on the metal bar like an aerialist. She flung her arms apart, enshrouded herself with light—a full-body halo pulsing outward from her head and trunk like a rainbow on fire—and jumped.

  At first it seemed the crowd’s astonished whoops were buoying her up, but no, this was her heritage at work, whizzing her across the darkening sky like a sentient comet. “Look!” “She’s flying!” “Sheila!” “Stay!” “Mary!” “Flying!” “Sheila!” She looped the loop. She spiraled around the lighthouse as if decorating a maypole, then zoomed over the bay toward the waiting schooner. The cool air frizzed her hair, billowed her dress, caressed her naked arms. Flying was better than swimming beneath Absecon Inlet. Flying was better than sex.

  She landed in the crow’s nest, startling a drowsy vulture and breaking one of its eggs. The damp, sinewy rigging squeaked and groaned as, hand under hand, she climbed down. To freedom. To safety. To a reality no baby bank aborter or crusade victim could ever invade. Clouds of unknowing and shadows of quantum doubt rolled in from the north, enveloping the schooner like black veils, catching on her spars, clinging to her masts.

  Julie stepped onto the foredeck. Three coal-eyed angels looked up from their labors—they were fixing a hole in a flesh-sail, suturing it closed with needle and thread—and applauded. Anthrax, stationed in the cockpit, placed a clawed hand to his lips and blew her a kiss.

  Resolutely she marched through Wyvern’s oak-paneled cabin and into the salon beyond, her pace slowed by the gummy yolk on her boots. The devil stood by the settee. “Welcome aboard,” he said, brushing her arm. A red carnation hung on the lapel of his white dinner jacket like a brilliant wound.

  “I made the right decision,” Julie asserted, voice quavering.

  “Nobody with our talents can abide the earth for long,” Wyvern corroborated. “Such a vale of unrealistic expectations. The bastards just grind you.”